ERTICO – ITS Europe, Av. Louise 326, 1050 Brussels
FOT-Net Stakeholders Workshops provide a forum for cooperation, discussion and information exchange, addressing FOT issues that have been identified as of high-priority to the stakeholders. European players interested in FOTs can use this medium to share information about planning, developments and results of trials which are being carried out at European and national levels.

FOT-Net’s “Common Roll-out plan to support coherent development and implementation of FOTs”[1] serves as guidance to setting-up the agenda of the Stakeholders Workshops. However FOT-Net remains open and will listen to requests from the FOT community to tackle important issues that may arise. Feedback can be sent via the FOT Wiki or directly to info@fot-net.eu.

In the 8th edition of the Stakeholders Workshops, FOT-Net took a closer look at what can be learned from past, current and recently launched pilots on Cooperative Systems.

The benefits of Cooperative Systems towards safer and more efficient mobility have been documented in several national and European projects. Yet full-scale deployment of Cooperative Systems in Europe has not been reached due to a number of obstacles. Pilots can however bridge this gap. Pilots can serve as the intermediary step between FOTs and deployment, testing and assessing Cooperative Systems applications before these can be deployed. In addition, by their very nature, pilots require that all value-chain stakeholders are involved in the pilots’ roll-out.

The European Commission believes in the potential of pilots and has greatly invested in the running of pilots at pan-European level, in particular through the Competitiveness and Innovation Programme (CIP). According to the European Commission’s ICT PSP Work Programme 2012: “The outcome of pilots should lead to harmonised testing, installation, monitoring and assessment of one or more of these globally prioritised cooperative systems applications, thereby contributing to a safer and more sustainable mobility in Europe”. To further promote deployment the European Commission stipulates to its funded pilots that the applications assessed remain in place after the pilot is completed.

What can we learn from these pilots? At the 8th FOT-Net Stakeholders Workshop several pilots funded by the European Commission were invited to discuss the following topics:

– Interoperability of deployed cooperative systems in the pilots

– Data sharing

– Deployment & Business plans

FOT-Net also took this opportunity to report on its activities by giving an update on the activities of its working groups and on the status of the stakeholders’ needs consultation.